Bite Size Chandler

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img_0947“Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver’s shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunch-box. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six time to six millionaires and so blasé and decadent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture-mover in a sweaty undershirt.”

Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister, 1949.

Bite Size Chandler

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img_1098“I think today there are much better film writers than I could ever be, because I never quite saw things in the terms of the camera, but always as dramatic scenes between people. I suppose you know the story of the writer who his racked brains how to show, very shortly, that a middle-aged man and his wife were no longer in love with each other. Finally he licked it. The man and his wife got into a lift and he kept his hat on. At the next stop a lady got into the lift and he immediately removed his hat. That is proper film writing. Me, I’d have done a four page scene about it. What his chap did took a few seconds.”

 

Raymond Chandler, 1957 (The Raymond Chandler Papers). 

 

Bite Size Chandler

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img_1051“‘You really think that?’

She stared at me. I finished my glass and got my weak look on my face again. She ignored it.

‘Of course I think it’, she said. ‘And so do you.’

‘I think it’s a little more complicated than that.’

Her smile was cosy and acid at the same time. ‘I beg your pardon. I forgot for the moment you were a detective. It would have to be complicated, wouldn’t it? I suppose there’s a sort of indecency about a simple case.'”

Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 1940.

Bite Size Chandler

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swbgood“I hold no particular brief for the detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of the living.”

Raymond Chandler, ‘The Simple Art’ of Murder’, 1944.

Elections as inference machines

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bbElection results are wonderful things for generating piles of interpretation, since they are so informationally thin  (they only tell you how many people voted for each candidate in particular places, not why, or who they were, or anything else). Where would social science be without the secret ballot? But election results do provide just enough information to set-off all sorts of inferential flights of fancy, supported by waves of supplementary polling and survey evidence of different sorts. This might be one of the more important things that elections do for democratic politics – they generate deliberation after the fact, if not so much before! Getting your interpretation to stick is itself a political strategy, of course. The meaning of election results is nothing if not theoretically-overdetermined, one might say – give someone an election result, and they can use it to confirm their own favourite theory of what is going on in the world just now. It is even possible, for example, for some people to interpret Donald Trump’s election victory, secured quite legitimately by winning fewer votes than his opponent, but winning those votes in the right places, as “an unmistakeable rejection of a political establishment and an economic system that simply isn’t working for most people.” Never mind.

Anyway, on occasions like these, I tend to find myself thinking that I should either re-read, finish, or read for the first time certain things that I have kicking around the house, things like this:

Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’, in Between Past and Future.

Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Times.

Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Why Americans Don’t Vote.

Jan-Werner Muller, ‘Real Citizens‘, Boston Review.

Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts.

Nick Clarke, Will Jennings, Jonathan Moss, Gerry Stoker, ‘Anti-politics and the Left’, Renewal, 24, (2).

David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.

David Slater

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I was sad to hear that David Slater has passed away. In a parallel universe, we would have been colleagues, if only the University I worked for way back when had had the intelligence to hire David when they had the chance. I have always found him to be one of the most compelling critical thinkers in and around geography. He is among the few people to have written thoughtfully about the geographical resonances of democratic theory. His argument about ‘learning from other regions‘ was both a crucial moment in the reception of postcolonial thought in human geography, and remains highly relevant in the context of current debates about southern theory and decoloniality. The very first thing I ever read by him, when I was an undergraduate, on economism in development theory, remains in my memory as one of the smartest things I have ever read, a model of critical analysis, unashamed of its theoretical sophistication, to which we perhaps should all aspire.

 

Towards a Geography of Injustice

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IMG_0166Just in time for anyone still wondering what they should pack to read by the beach this summer, here is a short paper by me entitled  Towards a Geography of Injustice, available open access at the Finnish journal Alue & Ympäristö (Region and Environment – my paper is not in Finnish, just to be clear), which I’m told is “unofficially” the “critical geography journal of Finland”.  This is pretty much the tidied up script of the Keynote Lecture I presented at the Annual Meeting of Finnish Geographers in Tampere back in October last year. I learnt lots and met nice people at the meeting, and thanks to Kirsi Pauliina Kallio for asking me to write the talk up properly.

This is a short and quite discursive version of only one part of a longer, and I hope deeper, argument about ‘the priority of injustice’ that I have been working out in my head while writing a book, which I think I have just completed this very week – it’s called, well,  The Priority of Injustice.  Somewhere between presenting a talk on ‘geography and the priority of injustice’ at Kentucky in April 2015, writing a first draft and then second draft in Vancouver last summer while on ‘research retreat’, and giving the Lecture in Tampere, I worked out what the book I have been writing was actually about – it’s about theories of democracy, substantively, I’ve always known that, but more specifically it’s about how to think about the vocation of thinking critically about democracy democratically, if you see what I mean. But it’s become a book about ‘the priority of injustice’- and this doesn’t mean favouring practice over theory, or even the empirical over the conceptual; it might mean not ever writing “(in)justice”, and not thinking of justice as an ideal; and not saying ‘post-political’; it might also mean thinking more about the meaning of domination, and freedom. Above all, it might mean thinking that politics is ordinary (but, obviously, in a not immediately obvious sense of ‘ordinary’….). 

This particular paper is an attempt to summarise all of that, and connect it to some thoughts about how these matters are and are not addressed in GeographyLand.

Unlikely incarnations of democracy

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clSo, let’s re-cap:

  • Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015, having secured enough nominations from MPs to appear on the leadership ballot because, back then, we all took it for granted that the point of being the leader of the Labour Party was to lead the Labour Party in Parliament, and at elections to this and other representative bodies in Scotland, Wales, EU, and locally.
  • Once elected as leader, Jeremy Corbyn demonstrates a complete inability to develop meaningful policy, of any sort, but especially on economic issues. His Shadow Chancellor, meanwhile, does draw up a good reading list.
  • As leader, he demonstrates culpable incompetence, perhaps mendacity, in the biggest single electoral decision since 1945, the result of which recalibrates British politics decisively to the right for at least a generation, if not forever.
  • He happily cultivates the idea that all of his failures to make any impression with the wider electorate are due to ‘media bias’, thereby demonstrating a certain degree of contempt for the cares and concerns and interests of the people he is meant to be persuading.
  • As both candidate and leader, Jeremy Corbyn is consistently presented as the embodiment of honesty and integrity and, above all, that most undemocratic of virtues,  of authenticity.
  • Jeremy Corbyn loses the confidence of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), the body, remember, without whose nominations he would not have been able to run for leader in the first place, because the point of the Labour Party etc, etc, etc.
  • This is a ‘coup’, apparently. Because the PLP has no other reason to exist than to follow the ‘mandate’ of the Authentic One.
  • Jeremy Corbyn refuses to resign. Because he would not, after all, want to be mistaken for Iain Duncan-Smith, or Margaret Thatcher.
  • Anyone who disagrees with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, (lack of ) actions, principles, pomposity, is called by his supporters either a Blairite, or a Red Tory, or a Neo-Con, or a Neoliberal (did I miss anything?). Because Jeremy Corbyn is The Vindicator.
  • And because if you have no doctrine, or if the doctrine you have is silly and unconvincing and poorly formulated, then all you’ve got to fall back on is an appeal to the ethos of unity.
  • Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is formally challenged because at least one MP is able to muster enough nominations from amongst the PLP.
  • All of this is apparently an affront to the ‘mandate’ held by the Leader, which seems to extend into infinity.
  • And all of this generates another rapid spurt of people joining the Labour Party, as if Corbyn’s leadership is all a cunning ploy to boost membership by encouraging both supporters and opponents to sign up (I’m not a terribly active person, politically. But I have slogged around streets in Swindon delivering leaflets for the Labour Party. If all those 10s of 1000s of new Corbyn recruits to the Labour Party put in even that minimum effort, the Labour Party’s performance in elections in May and at the Referendum would have been very different. My point is not a holier-than-thou one, it’s that the growth in membership under Corbyn over the last year does not necessarily mean anything).
  • A kerfuffle ensues over whether the candidates for the leadership of the Labour Party should be treated equally, by all being required to secure a threshold of nominations from the PLP. It turns out, because this is politics remember, that they do not have to be treated equally in this way at all.
  • So Jeremy Corbyn will again be a candidate for leader. Because, despite not being able to command the support of the PLP, he would not want to be mistaken for Andrea Leadsom.
  • The Labour Party NEC then decides to rather arbitrarily limit the franchise through which the forthcoming leadership election will be decided. Because, again, its politics, which is fine.
  • Somewhere down the line, though, depending on the outcome, the Labour Party NEC may well have just inadvertently, perhaps not, sought to redefine the meaning of what it is to be an MP in the UK – the lifting of the requirement that an incumbent leader should have to seek nominations again for a leadership election, even after massively losing a vote of confidence of his MPs in Parliament, implies that in the event of Corbyn being re-elected, MPs (the same ones, or some freshly selected ones perhaps) should function not as representatives of their constituents, but primarily as delegates accountable to the ‘membership’, the size and shape of which is, remember, just revealed to be easily manipulated through political horse-trading (although actually, this bit is open to alternative interpretations – does it indicate a prefiguration of the Labour Party anticipating a move to full PR and therefore a list-based system of selecting candidates…?).

As politics, this is wonderful, grubby, full of spite, so who could complain. ‘Democracy’ is a word being claimed by different sides in all of this, especially where it helps to close down an argument or potentially silence critics or de-legitimise opponents. It’s a very good word with which to do that. It does not belong to one side or the other, but different versions of what ‘democracy’ means are certainly at stake in this rolling drama (roughly speaking, narrowly narcissistic activist-centric ones versus compromised ‘polyarchic’ ones). But it’s politics, in the end. Properly political politics, too.

 

 

 

 

Seeing Like a Market and its Problems

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UntitledFinally, a paper co-written by myself and Nick Mahony entitled ‘Marketing practices and the reconfiguration of public action‘ is published, in print, in Policy and Politics. It was made available online almost exactly a year ago. One of the odd things about the drawn-out rhythms of academic publishing is the tendency to be presented with previous versions of your own self. The paper arises out of a small research project on market segmentation methodologies that Nick and I worked on together when both at the OU. The Report from that project was published by the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement.

The new paper develops a more theoretically oriented argument about how to interpret the increasingly widespread use of a range of marketing technologies in non-commercial fields, including the public sector, by charities, by political consultants, and in the third sector. So, in that respect, its part of an ongoing argument I have been making (both in publications and on this blog) about the limits of standard ways of using concepts such as governmentality and neoliberalism in critical social science.

It is also, I can now see, now it is finally done and dusted, one of a series of ‘occasional papers’ in which I have tried to make use of the idea of  ‘problematization‘ to reframe the ways in which one might pursue the vocation of ‘critique’, including pieces on ideas of security and public life in Dialogues in Human Geography, a more  theoretical treatment of how this idea helps us read Foucault in nonsite.com, and an ongoing effort to use the ideas to make sense of the proliferation of urban concern across any number of fields.

So, anyway, one more time, here is the abstract of the Policy and Politics piece:

“Market segmentation methodologies are increasingly used in public policy, arts and culture management and third sector campaigning. Rather than presume that this is an index of creeping neoliberalisation, we track the shared and contested understandings of the public benefits of using segmentation methods. Segmentation methods are used to generate stable images of individual and group attitudes and motivations, and these images are used to inform strategies that seek to either change these dispositions or to mobilise them in new directions. Different segments of the population are identified as bearing particular responsibilities for public action on different issues.”